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THE PHOTOPERFORMER

A CONCEPTUAL PERSONA CREATED TO EXPLORE, CONFRONT AND EXPAND MY BEING

THE
PHOTOPERFORMER

MANUEL VASON

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If photography is an addiction, the act of photographing is the cure.

The PhotoPerformer, 2016

Here, I’m trying to articulate a comprehensive narrative analysing the universe of The PhotoPerformer, a world of scattered activities motivated by creative research, an attraction toward the unconventional and the urge to change.

In 2015, after the completion of the Double Exposures book, a project made in collaboration with 44 performance artists, I felt the necessity to initiate a new type of collaboration, an inner exchange with my alter-ego, The PhotoPerformer.

While reflecting on my relationship (addiction) with photography, I realised that, our days, photography functions as a ‘technology of seeing’ as a sort of engine of visualisation that affects the way we perceive, memorise and relate with others.

In my opinion, through the photographic perspective/experience, we have developed a sense of supremacy over the environment we inhabit and adopted a fake sense of control. Since its invention, photography has allowed us to objectify, order and catalogue the everyday, the micro and the macro.

While embracing photography in every aspect of our life, we neglect some of its ontological characteristics: its partiality, its provisionality, its superficiality and its manipulative power to alter reality.

The PhotoPerformer through its more recent project Unframing Photography aims to exercise photography as a counter-technology of seeing-otherwise, in permanent critique with its fixed positions, affirming the precariousness of the medium as a creative potentiality.

We need to consider how to redeploy technology against itself in a creative way to make possible new modes of free being. (Foucault, Ethics, 262)

The PhotoPerformer lives behind a thin layer of glass, São Paulo, 2015 (Photo by Maurizio Mancioli)

Manuel Vason is a photographer converted into performer so to become an artist with a unique voice converging body and camera.

Fermín Carreño Martínez, Director of Casa de Cultura de la UAEM, (Autonomous University of Mexico State),

Manuel Vason’s art practice is a clear example of the possible expansion of photography as action art, which I hope will be considered by the contemporary dance community as a benchmark for the emancipation and urgent expansion of our dance scene.

Eleno Guzmán Gutiérrez, Director of CEPRODAC, (Center of Production of Contemporary Dance Mexico City)

The PhotoPerformer, a human camera is forcing photography to unfold in the existential act of photography as a transcendental whole that guides us toward the uncertainty of darkness and meaning.

Yoatzin Balbuena, Artist Collaborator

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